Andrew Lentvorski wrote: > Even *with* whitespace, somoething like "Eats shoots and leaves" is
ambiguous without punctuation.
No, it's ambiguous because of word meaning overload. The same kind of confusion is one reason I don't normally like function and operator overloading.
In this sentence, the word "shoots" can have the meaning of "firing a weapon" or "a stem portion of a plant". Same reasoning for leaves. In German, much of this confusion is ameliorated because nouns are capitalized. The above sentence using German syntax would then have only specific meanings:
"Eats shoots and leaves" => Eats some food, fires a weapon, vacates the premises.
Eats Shoots and Leaves => Consumes vegetable matter consisting of stems and leafy portions.
What really happens is that a capitalized word is not the same as a lowercase word. You do the same thing in any case-sensitive computer language.
The German language even uses separate words to describe eating: essen: eating done by humans fressen: eating done by animals Gus -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
